The “close tab” button in firefox 1.5 had a really nice feature: monotony. That button was always in the same place, no matter what. The tabs in firefox 2.0 have individual close tab buttons. While this helps us immerse ourselves in the interface thanks to the effects of direct manipulation, it makes it very frustrating […]

Has anyone tried using Amazon’s “RESTful” webservices? I’ve had many headaches using them. If I’m using PHP, I like to use nuSOAP to access SOAP services, because PHP’s facilities for XML (at least in version 4) are terrible. nuSOAP seems to have interop issues with some of Alexa’s/Amazon’s webservices, so that’s a pretty big turn […]

I’m constantly on the hunt for the perfect templating module. When I was much younger, primarily doing PHP, I quickly saw that string concatenation and variable interpolation were not good solutions when trying to author lots of complex documents. I did some searching, and found Smarty, which satisfied my needs at that time. Over the […]

Why gmail and gchat together? tools for communication broadly tools for communicationg densely more eyeballs, more time spent on ads $$$ I’m sure most people are now aware that gmail’s interface includes not only mail, but a live chat system. Gchat is fully integrated into the email experience. I’ve been wondering why. I suppose one […]

Modern Day Oracle Arthur Clarke said Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What is today’s technology? What is today’s advanced technology? What technology is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic? Are there any services like that around? I’ve been working, on the side, on idea purposefully intended to be magical. I’ve been […]

Quick Summary (in order of importance) Adopt openID Opaque Attention Data Subscribe to users’ events Amazon.com’s site is fantastic. I get great recommendations, and I’ve started buying more and more stuff from them. However, there are a couple of things I’d like to see from them, technologically. OpenID Provider OpenID should be supported everywhere. There’s […]

A plugin or bookmarklet or greasemonkey script that takes the highlighted text and creates a blog entry for you (hAtom formatted, of course). It can automatically save it as a draft, not necessarily actually publish. It also facilitates editing your post while browsing. Does flock do this? A google notebook type of interface would be […]

Imagine a greasemonkey script, or even a browser plugin, or hyperscope, or tabulator, or even a google homepage gagdet that allows you to make phone calls effortlessly by connecting to an asterisk server you have access to. This would need a slick contact database/auto completion to work well. Very doable though.